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Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, Demolition and Berlin's Difficult Subterranean Heritage

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Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, Demolition and Berlin's Difficult Subterranean Heritage Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage BENNETT, Luke <http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6416-3755> Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/24085/ This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Published version BENNETT, Luke (2019). Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage. Geographia Polonica, 92 (1). Copyright and re-use policy See http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk Grubbing out the Führerbunker: Ruination, demolition and Berlin’s difficult subterranean heritage Luke Bennett Reader in Space, Place & Law, Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University, Norfolk 306, Howard St, Sheffield, S1 1WB, United Kingdom. [email protected] Abstract This article presents a case study examining the slow-death of the Berlin Führerbunker since 1945. Its seventy year longitudinal perspective shows how processes of ruination, demolition and urban renewal in central Berlin have been affected by materially and politically awkward relict Nazi subterranean structures. Despite now being a buried pile of rubble, the Führerbunker’s continued resonance is shown to be the product of a heterogeneous range of influences, spanning wartime concrete bunkers’ formidable material resistance, their affective affordances and evolving cultural attitudes towards ruins, demolition, memory, memorialisation, tourism and real estate in the German capital. Keywords Ruin – Demolition – Bunkers – Subterranean – Berlin – Nazism – Heritage – Materiality 1 On 30th April 1945 Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker, a reinforced concrete structure buried 8.5 metres beneath the ministerial gardens flanking the Reich Chancellery in central Berlin. The final days leading up to Hitler’s death have been the subject of countless books, films and ruminations and will not be restated here. Instead this article will explore the far less well-known story of the subsequent, slow-death of the Führerbunker itself, a story that can provide valuable insights into the ways in which processes of ruination, demolition and urban renewal are affected by materially and politically awkward relict subterranean structures. The analysis will be developed by weaving together glimpses of the Führerbunker in studies of Berlin’s urban memory and memorialisation (Ladd 1997; Huyssen 2003; Till 2005; Jordan 2006) with Bartolini’s (2015) recent interpretation of the immutable materialities of a fascist era underground concrete bunker in Rome. By following the fate of the bunker site from 1945 through to the present day, this article addresses calls for rich case study examination of both processes of ruination and of the recalcitrant, affective-material political geographies of subterranean structures. First, as regards the particularities of the political geographies of the subterranean, Adey (2013: 53) has called for investigation of the “intense intimacies” to be found in the underground spaces to which state power retreats in extremis. Klinke’s (2018) recent investigation of the Cold War history of the West German Government’s nuclear bunker at Marienthal has done much to explicate the materialisation (and claustrophobia) of place, bodies and exterminatory projects entwined in the “depths of power” (Elden’s 2013) of an underground command bunker during its operational life, but his study says comparatively little about the effect of those influences upon the bunker’s after-life. In noting the limits of his own points of focus, Klinke acknowledges and defers to the recent rise of a body of 2 scholarship concerned with the interplay of matter, affect and meaning-making within abandoned, post-war military and governmental Cold War bunkers (e.g. Bennett 2017a). But abandoned Nazi-era bunkers (ruined or otherwise) have been a notably rarer subject of study (c.f. Virilio 1994; Bennett 2011; Tzalmona 2011). This article therefore seeks to address this deficit by examining the lingering, awkward political valence of the ruins of the most iconic Nazi era subterranean bunker – the Führerbunker – following its abandonment, and the various never-quite-successful attempts made after 1945 to extinguish its feared affective-material and political potency. Secondly, as regards contributing to the analysis of ruination, this article’s narrative, case study-based approach responds to Cairns & Jacobs’ (2014) call for examination of how buildings die. Furthermore it also responds to DeSilvey & Edensor’s (2012) call for more studies of ruination as a process, for they argue that contemporary ruin studies tend to focus on how ruins come to be engaged with (as heritage or otherwise) in the present, with the ruin then treated as a ‘given’, leaving unexamined the processual questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’ the ruin has arisen. This dominant approach is shaped by critical heritage studies’ argument (e.g. Smith 2006; Harrison 2013) that heritage is a social construct, formed and reformed in the present appropriating the remains (material or immaterial) of ‘the past’ and interpreting and valorising them through contemporary lenses. Thus, in this approach, the scholar’s primary concern is to study how the past is being used (as heritage) in the present. Whilst this remains an important analytical approach, this article’s search for an account of the slow ruination of the Führerbunker seeks to show that the fate of the Führerbunker is ultimately more than the sum of heritage debates and interpretations alone: for the persistence of that ruin is also a function of its resistant materiality, its political potency and wider urban contingencies. 3 This article’s concern is therefore to account for the evolving life-course of the Führerbunker since 1945, accounting for its survival (of sorts) within an urban landscape otherwise subjected to comprehensive waves of, near total, urban erasure and renewal. The analysis will show the significance of the interplay of the Führerbunker’s resistant material properties (i.e. the obstinacy of its subterranean reinforced concrete), its ascribed affective and atmospheric properties and the shifting politico-cultural intensities of remembering/forgetting targeted at the bunker-ruin site across the last 70 years. Attitudes towards any structure (and the action, forbearance, care and/or neglect that they engender) all have an influence over its rate of decay, and whether expressed as the anxious ruin-eradicating attentiveness of “ruinphobia” (the ability of certain ruins to haunt urban managers, and wider publics, because of the feared disordering symbolic contagion that they represent (Bennett 2017b) and for which the Führerbunker presents an extreme-case exemplar) or in terms of instincts towards heritage revalorisation and potential conservation and curation. In this regard the case study will show that despite its physical near-obliteration the Führerbunker remains extant – in that its notoriety appears to exceed its materiality. Thus to account for the persistence of the Führerbunker the analysis must necessarily consider not just the material decay aspect of ruination, but also acknowledge the parallel (and, at this exceptional site at least, seemingly slower) playing out of a semantic decay, by which the potency Führerbunker as a politically toxic symbol and/or “difficult heritage” (Macdonald 2009) has – if not faded away, then at least modulated over time. This article’s focus is upon examining the Führerbunker’s recent past, and it will largely present the Führerbunker ruins as a revenant, wound-like agent periodically resurfacing to 4 trouble German memory and the contemporary ordering of the Berlin. No discussion attempted on the Führerbunker’s potential future rehabilitation as a more semantically open-ended, leisure and entertainment commodity. This is due to pressures of space in this article, and its desire to avoid dwelling on the theme of contemporary ruin/bunker re- appropriation to an extent that might drown-out other – less commonly heard – lines of enquiry. Clearly the Führerbunker’s semantic decay is still far from complete – it still has resonance, here witness the proliferation of 3D virtual reconstructions of the Führerbunker across the internet and movies. But as the Nazi era reaches the threshold of ‘living memory’ a less didactic framing of the Führerbunker’s notoriety (and less fear of its ascribed infective power) might emerge in due course. There is scope for further work to be done to understand the situation of the Führerbunker in the present-day, and also to further characterise the dynamics of semantic decay both for modern ruins generally and specifically as regards the Führerbunker (given that this present study has been able only to work with English language sources, and has approached its topic with the aim of contextualising processes of demolition, ruination and urban renewal rather than examining the shifting figuration of the Führerbunker from the point of view of German memory/trauma studies). Further investigation could, for instance, examine whether the increasing multivalence witnessed in recent re-valorisation and re-engagement with the ruins of Cold War-era bunkers (see here the contributors to Bennett 2017a) might ever be replicated with their more unequivocally ‘difficult heritage’ cousins: Nazi
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